SOURCE: "Mauriac and the Art of the Short Story," in François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals, edited by John E. Flower and Bernard C. Swift, Berg Publishers, 1989, pp. 77-95.

François Mauriac is famous above all as a novelist. The fact that he wrote a number of successful short stories appears, on the whole, to have been neglected by the critics. Far from being studied as a genre in their own right, these stories have tended to be studied entirely in relation to the novels, and to have aroused interest only in so far as they give greater insight into Mauriac's general literary intentions.

At times, in his own comments on his works, Mauriac appears to have given the green light to such critical attitudes. Referring to 'Insomnie', for example, he wrote: 'C'est le chapitre d'un roman que je n' ai pas écrit' [Preface to Plongées, in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. II]. This remark, if unqualified by any of Mauriac's other more ambiguous statements, has led to the belief that in a novelist of the importance of Mauriac short stories must either be ébauches for novels, or, at any rate, possess the same characteristics as a novel. Jacques Petit's notes to the Pléiade edition, for example, bear this out. Of 'Coups de couteau' he writes: 'La scène décrite dans "Coups de couteau" pauvait conduire à une situation romanesque riche' [in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I]. From his reading of 'Thérèse chez le docteur', he draws the following general conclusions on Mauriac's art as a writer of short stories: 'On voit que la nouvelle, pour Mauriac, est moins un récit court, ordonné autour d'un thème, qu'un épisode de roman, détaché, et qui en garde la complexité' [in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. III].

Yet Mauriac himself was aware of at least some of the basic differences between a short story and a chapter of a novel. The statement quoted above about 'Insomnie' is continued as follows: 'Beaucoup de destinées qui sont dramatiques ne fournissent pas l'étoffe d'un roman, parce qu'elles manquent de péripéties. L'histoire du héros d'Insomnie ne peut avoir qu'un chapitre. Sa douleur se perd dans le sable [Preface to Plongées].

There is more to the art of the short story, of course, than the purely negative characteristic of lacking the 'péripéties' suitable to a novel. While we do not have much in the way of positive statements by Mauriac himself about that art, we do find, in his best short stories, evidence of his consummate skill in this very different genre, and an ability to adapt, and at times to abandon, his novelist's techniques, in order to fit into a new and demanding framework. One of the best examples of this, as we shall see, is 'Thérèse chez le docteur', a short story which, because one of its protagonists appears in other works by Mauriac, has been presumed to be merely one episode in an ongoing novel, and to have no independent artistic form.

This is not to say that there are not short stories by Mauriac which fall below this standard. His small output in this genre is remarkably uneven. One can, in fact, group Mauriac's successfulstories into two groups, each written at specific points in time: 'Un Homme de lettres', 'Coups de couteau' and 'Insomnie' in 1926-7, 'Thérèse chez le docteur', 'Thérèse à l'hôtel' and 'Le Rang' in 1933-6. These periods reflect precise changes in Mauriac's attitudes as a writer: after the pre-1924 period, in which his writings had on the whole combined a desire for edification with a use of the traditional techniques of the pre-war Catholic novel, the first great trilogy of successful stories was written in the period when, in Mauriac's own words, 'Je crus résoudre les difficultés de mon état en m'appliquant à peindre la vie telle que je la voyais, et à inventer les créatures qui spontanément naissaient de mon expérience' [Preface to Trois Récits, in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I], and when, accepting all the techniques of modern narrative fiction, he turned his back on the traditional 'Catholic' techniques. With 'Le Demon de la connaissance' (1928), however, we find Mauriac at the beginning of that return to a need for an edifying content, and for some of the traditional 'Catholic' techniques, which is epitomised by the novel Ce qui était perdu. Not only that, these new concerns succeed in destroying the successful short-story form which Mauriac had been developing, and substitute a work overweighted by novelistic rather than short-story concerns. By the time we come to the second group of successful stories, however, Mauriac has reached that new literary equilibrium which, from Le Næud de vipères onwards, was to mark his literary creation; and, in the process, he manages once again to disentangle his short-story techniques from purely novelistic concerns, and create satisfying works of art in their own right.

These two groups of stories in fact use remarkably different techniques, each of them perfectly valid. The first group gains its effects through what has been described as 'la seule évocation, l'approfondissement d'un instant précis d'une vie' [René Godenne, La Nouvelle française, 1974]. The second, while homing in equally precisely on specific moments of experience, relies far more on a highly organised framework, in which economical methods of allusion convey more than acres of text might do.

Mauriac's other short stories, however, have a variety of faults. Some suffer from a desire to do what a novel should have done, and from a resultant elephantiasis of form. Others are afflicted by triteness, or by a desire for edification. A look at the faults of these lesser stories will, by contrast, pinpoint for us some of the positive qualities possessed by Mauriac's best short stories. Let us start with a youthful effort, 'Le Visiteur nocturne' (published on 25 May 1920, in the Revue des jeunes).

At first sight, 'Le Visiteur nocturne' appears to have many of the attributes of a successful short story in a traditional nineteenth-century mould. It has a simple story-line, set in a precise form, with a beginning, middle and end. It starts with the evocation of a successful writer, Octave, who has become increasingly disillusioned by the life he is leading. Late at night, when alone after a party, he is visited by an apparent stranger, poor and miserably dressed, who turns out to be a childhood friend called Gabriel. Octave lets him come in, but is grudging in his welcome, and graceless in his reception of Gabriel's remi-niscences; he hides the presence of the delicious left-overs from his evening entertainment, and gives his guest bread, cheese and water. He allows Gabriel, who is emigrating next day to Dakar on a ship sailing from Bordeaux, to spend the night in his armchair, but denies him the luxurious divan, for fear of it being spoiled. The next day Octave wakes after Gabriel's departure; he is now uneasy about the way he has treated Gabriel, and wants to make it up to him; he is full of a sense of sin. He rushes to Bordeaux, presuming because of the bad weather that the ship will not have departed; but it has, and he soon learns that it has gone down with all hands. Octave ends on his knees in the cathedral.

A satisfying shape, but a rather obvious one. For a twentieth-century story, it is almost too neat and predictable. Above all the story is written with an obvious aim of edification. The man who has strayed from God is brought back to God by the central experience depicted; a voice from childhood returns him to purity.

This aim is underlined by the language and imagery that is used. The visitor (significantly named Gabriel) is clearly a messenger from God when, presented with a glass of water, he says: '"Voilà donc ce verre d'eau qui sera rendu au centuple . . . mais cent verres d'eau, Octave, pour éteindre un feu éternel!'" Octave, in his later remorse, uses similarly Biblical terms: '"Que ne m'avais-tu pas prévenu!" gémit Octave. Alors il se rappela qu'il est écrit que le Fils de l'Homme viendra comme un voleur, à l'heure que nous n'avons pas choisie. Heureux celui qui n'a pas une maison à mettre en ordre, un champ à ensemencer, une passion à assouvir une suprême fois.' The identification of Gabriel with Christ continues in an even more obvious way: 'Ah! le revoir une fois encore, le servir, essuyer d'un linge cette face désolée, apaiser cette faim et cette soif! [ . . . ] Trop tard! "Seigneur, c'est à ce croisement de route qu'il aurait fallu Vous reconnaître et que j'eusse dû sentir mon âme ardente en moi.'" Finally, the sudden sense of forgiveness that Octave experiences is found to have coincided with the sinking of the ship with Gabriel aboard; it is as though Gabriel had served as a sacrifice for him. Mauriac is here using, in a rather simplistic manner, the theme of vicarious suffering, which was so central to traditional techniques of the Catholic novel.

It is, of course, possible to find in this story some aspects of Mauriac's later, more polished literary techniques. But where these later techniques are subtly and effectively used, here they are vitiated by heavy and obvious clumsiness. Thus the visual and sensuous evocation of past scenes, which is used with such subtlety in stories like 'Le Rang', is here merely one more heavy sack of pious offerings:

Il chercha dans son passé: en lui, autour de ce regard, peu à peu des objets émergeaient; il vit la barrière d'une cour de récréation [ . . . ] En une seconde (car les images se succédaient si rapides qu'Octave les aurait pu croire simultanées) il entendit les chaînes de I' encensoir qu'ouvrait dans le chœur embrasé, embrumé, cet enfant vêtu d'écarlate. Sur l'autel de la Vierge, les lilas étaient mourants; une voix indiquait la page du cantique qui soudain jaillissait, soutenu par l'orgue[ . . . ]

Similarly, the opening evocation of the silent house, and the listening Octave ovserving himself in a mirror, which promises mature Mauriacian effects, declines into banal obviousness: 'Il [ . . . ] entendit sourdre au plus secret de son être une protestation, comme une voix étouffée, comme un appel perdu.' Above all, however, this story lacks any of the nuances, the ambiguity one expects of modern literature. It tells a moral tale with no surprises and no blurred edges.

When, after the successful 1926-7 trio, Mauriac came to write 'Le Démon de la connaissance' (1928), he fell back into many of the same pitfalls. Again, he is concerned to edify, as certain authorial interventions make absolutely clear: 'Ainsi délire cet orgueilleux: comme il est loin du Maître humble de cœur! Mais il ne le sait pas.' But there are even more serious flaws in this story, which stem from another of Mauriac's over-riding concerns: the desire to depict in full the character and fate of the central figure, Maryan. Maryan is closely based on Mauriac's childhood friend André Lacaze; and, though many of the details of the story are imaginary, it is as though it runs in a kind of counterpoint to the actual events of Lacaze's life, which appears to have been a starting-point for a process that Jacques Petit describes as follows: 'Le romancier rêve sur un souvenir et le déforme' [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I]. As Mauriac himself said, 'Tout est inventé, mais non le personnage lui-même' [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I].

This concern with the character of his friend dominates this short story and makes Mauriac's account of the imaginary events of his life clumsy. Instead of those shorthand glimpses of aspects of human character in which the short story excels, we find a desire to tell as much as possible, and over as long a period as seems necessary. It is the attempt to compress a whole range of events, over a period of years, into one short story, which strains the form of the genre so disastrously. We see, in Chapter I, Maryan and his friend Lange in his school playground, and perceive the elements in Maryan's make-up: his intellectual violence, his physical ugliness, his strange tics, and so on. Maryan describes his intention to go into a seminary, more for negative reasons than because of a clear religious vocation. By Chapter II, Maryan has entered the seminary; Lange visits him; by the end of the chapter we have moved forward once more in time, and find a letter from Maryan announcing his departure from the seminary and asking Lange to join him on a visit to his sister-in-law's. Chapters III and IV deal dramatically with the complicated relationships and hang-ups revealed by this visit. They are the high-point of the story, and as one sequence in a complete novel would be highly successful. Finally, we have Maryan's apparent conversion, which, by a tour de force mauriacien, is seen to be mistaken: 'Ainsi [ . . . ] Maryan se parle à lui-même et déjà, à son insu, falsifie la parole de Dieu. The story ends with a look to the future, and to Maryan's eventual conversion in the trenches of the First World War:

Se résignerait-il jamais aux longues étapes d'une recherche sans espérance? De nouveau, il regarda le ciel comme un homme qui guette un présage. Mais il n'y découvrit pas le terrible 'chemin court' qui, bien des années plus tard, lui serait proposé pour atteindre Dieu. Il ne vit pas en esprit cette tranchée dans la terre où, quelques secondes avant l'assaut, quelques minutes avant d'être abattu, il répéterait à mi-voix la plus belle parole que la guerre ait inspirée à un homme près de mourir: 'Enfin! je vais savoir'.

The ending, and much of the previous comment on Maryan's state of mind, share the main fault of Ce qui était perdu, which was to succeed it two years later: an omniscient narrator who perceives religious truths, including the private thoughts of his characters, and their conversions, and who judges these things from a vantage-point of moral certainty.

A swift outline of the shape of this story, such as we have given, naturally cannot do justice to the complexity of emotions and motivation depicted within it. What it does, however, is to show us how the story as a whole suffers from problems inherent in any short story written without regard to the basic problems of the genre. To move chronologically through events widely spaced in time is natural to the novel; in the short story it only works (as in certain nineteenth-century examples) if there is a clear dramatic twist involved, and if the issues can be explained simply and clearly. Far more satisfactory, when the emotional issues are complicated, is to concentrate on 'un instant précis', and to make use of flashbacks, as Mauriac does so effectively in 'Coups de couteau' and in 'Le Rang'. Here, Chapter III and the first part of Chapter IV of 'Le Démon de la connaissance' would fit superbly into a novel; but unfortunately the rest of that novel has been crammed into the first two chapters and the final paragraph. Forgetting his success with short-story techniques only a year or so before, Mauriac here seems to see a short story as being merely a shortened novel.

Two remaining stories from a later date, 'Le Drôle' and 'Conte de Noël', both use traditional techniques of the short story perfectly adequately, but both are vitiated by faults of another order. 'Le Drôle' need not retain us long. Appearing in the same year (1933) as two of Mauriac's most successful stories, it was doomed from the start by the particular requirement it was expected to fulfil—'histoire pour les enfants'—as part of a series of such stories written by great writers. Unfortunately Mauriac's approach to this task was to produce a rather banal little tale which might well still arouse some enthusiasm nowadays on a children's television programme, but which is so predictable that it has very little literary merit. A governess arrives to look after a child who has been so monstrously spoiled that he terrorises his family, and is a legend in the neighbourhood; she eventually tames him partly through tough tactics, partly through kindness to his dog, and partly through the power of music. All those who wished to accuse the governess of unkindness to the child are put to confusion by his clear attachment to her. Not a handkerchief remains dry among the readers.

The banality of this little 'cautionary tale' is matched by the sheer unreality of the central figure. Spoilt children have often figured in literature, but the powers this child holds over his family and servants are so exaggerated as to appear completely unreal. The whole story would fit well into an unreal Struwelpeter format, but the realistic techniques used by the author only serve to heighten the reader's disbelief. Elements in those techniques, it must be noted, are at times evidence of the advances Mauriac has made in the short story; but they revolve around an unsuitable subject.

'Conte de Noël', published in 1938, is unusual among Mauriac's short stories in that it uses one of the central nineteenth-century short-story techniques: the surprise ending. The first part of the story takes place in the narrator's childhood. Christmas is approaching; in the playground a child, Jean de Blaye, who has always been persecuted because of his curls (which the narrator secretly admires because they remind him of Little Lord Fauntleroy), is this time being mocked because of his belief in Father Christmas. He and the narrator discuss the matter; Jean has implicit faith in his mother's word. However, they both decide to stay awake and see. In the event the narrator, half-asleep, ends up by half-believing. At school after the holiday, however, Jean de Blaye appears shorn of his curls. Of his mother, he says: 'Elle ne me blaguera plus' [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. III]. The scene now shifts to a Paris night club, several years later, where the adult narrator, nostalgic for the Christian Christmas at home which he is missing, is drinking alone. He sees a person he believes to be Jean de Blaye, and says to him: 'On n'aurait pas dû te couper les boucles. The man, who turns out to be Jean's younger brother, is naturally bewildered. Of the curls, he tells a story: his mother had owned a silver box, which the boys were sure contained a treasure. Jean, of whom his brother says, 'Elle l'aimait plus que moi [ . . . ] Et au fond je crois bien qu'elle n'aimait que lui . . . Mais quelque chose les séparait, je ne sais quoi', forced the lock one day, and found—his childhood curls. Jean, furious, burned them. Jean, it is discovered, is now dead. By hints, we learn that he 'avait fini comme un mauvais garçon, comme un enfant perdu'. The narrator goes home moved by the story, but above all with his vocation as a writer made clear. 'Un romancier venait de naître et ouvrait les yeux sur ce triste monde.'

A number of subtle techniques are used to create the effects in this story, such as we shall see in Mauriac's best stories. Above all, the conversation with the brother, with its hints and reticences, is a masterpiece. And the harsh treatment of a subject with the misleading title 'Conte de Noël' is striking and quite effective. But the story as a whole just does not work. The attempt to produce an 'effect de surprise' à la Maupassant is clumsy; we have already guessed that Jean's break with his mother is what has made him cut off his curls (which by the stress on them have already become central); we can guess the effect this will have on what was clearly a doting mother; as for his eventual 'bad life', the story leading up to it appears disproportionate, so that the story loses the desired effect. We find, perhaps, a clue to Mauriac's intentions in the last section; perhaps this is the kind of story that might have set him on the path to writing at an early stage; perhaps it is an early story which he has published at this late date, to make up the number of stories in Plongées. Certainly, unlike the other stories in this collection, this story had not been published before. From its mawkish tone, and from the self-conscious ending so typical of a young writer, it would seem to date from an earlier part of Mauriac's career.

If we turn now to Mauriac's successful trio of stories from 1926 and 1927, we find not only that the three dangers of edification, of banality, and of novel-form have been avoided, but that the traditional short-story shape, as found in 'Le Drôle' or 'Conte de Noël', has also been lost. The 'beginning, middle and end' story-line, with its satisfying shape, so typical of the nineteenth-century short story, has given way to the evocation of a mood or a situation in their own right, to the depiction of an instant in time, the overtones of which can spread far and wide outside the confines of the story itself.

'Un Homme de lettres' depicts a writer's fluctuating relationships with women. Much of this nouvelle consists of attempts, by the writer himself and by those around him, to understand his behaviour. On the last page, as the narrator has produced what appears a convincing explanation, Jérôme (the writer) answers his enquiry as to whether this is correct with a series of questions, which seem mostly addressed to himself:

—Avouez que j'ai touché juste!

—Juste ou non, comment le saurais-je? Qu'est-ce donc que signifie: rejoindre un être? [...] Pourquoi l'amitié ne nous suffit-elle? [. . . ] Pourquoi faut-il que, seule, une femme nous féconde? [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I]

The ending of the story remains open, with Jérôme obviously heading off for another liaison: 'La main levée de Jérôme arrêta un chauffeur; mais je n'entendis pas l'adresse qu'il luidonnait à voix basse.'

'Insomnie' is the evocation of a seemingly interminable night in which the hero, Louis, goes over and over in his mind the suffering caused him by the love he feels for a woman of whom he is morbidly jealous, and who perpetually appears to give cause for that jealousy. The story begins at a dinner-party, and is seen at this stage through the eyes of the woman herself. She is aware that she has given Louis cause for jealousy, and that he has left the party: 'La jeune femme écoute à, peine: un absent l'occupe, qu'elle torture. La douleur de Louis ressemble à un feu qu'elle entretient, dont elle ne peut s'éloigner' [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. II]. The rest of the story deals with Louis's insomniac night. Finally, as dawn breaks, despite the torments he has suffered, despite his realisation of her cruelty, he awaits the telephone call that will cause it all to start again: 'Cependant Louis guette l'appel du téléphone. Ce bruit de pas? C'est peut-être une dépêche qu'on apporte. Il attend la permission de cette femme, il attend que son bourreau lui fasse un signe pour se relever, pour rentrer dans la vie.'

As with 'Un Homme de lettres', the ending is open; the tranche of Louis's existence that we have seen is selfperpetuating, and has no beginning, middle or end. The two stories we have just described thus not only provide a new type of short story, much in line with the contemporary developments in the English short story and with later developments in France; they also (particularly 'Un Homme de lettres') make use of the new ambiguity which Mauriac had introduced to his novels in this period, and of which Thérèse Desqueyroux is the outstanding example: an individual's motivation is a mystery not only to others but also to the individual him- or herself; a variety of interpretations is possible for every action; above all, people fail to communicate with one another.

'Coups de couteau' shares these qualities, and is perhaps the most outstanding short story of the three. For this reason I have chosen it for a rather closer examination of some of the more detailed techniques Mauriac uses; it must be borne in mind, however, that a similar examination of the other two would reveal many of the same characteristics.

The time-scale for 'Coups de couteau' is only one night. It takes the form of a conversation between husband and wife, in which events outside that time-span are merely referred to, or remembered by one of the two characters. The third of the four chapters consists entirely of a flashback, in the mind of the wife, to a specific previous event; this flashback technique is here seen to be far more effective, in the context of a concise short story, than any chronological treatment such as that in 'Le Démon de la connaissance' could have been.

The subject is, once again, suffering in love. The husband, Louis, a famous artist, is as tormented by his love for a young woman as was his namesake, the hero of 'Insomnie'. Yet here the whole matter is complicated by the presence, at his side, of another suffering human being, his wife Elisabeth, of whose feelings he is basically unaware. The whole story revolves about the impossibility of communication, and of ever seeing into each other's hearts.

The story starts with a brilliant evocation of the wakeful Elisabeth, who has been awaiting the return of the children's nurse before going to sleep; she becomes aware that her husband is also awake. She realises that he is distressed, and presses him to tell her the reason. She begins to realise that it is because of a woman, but still desires to know more: 'Elle pouvait être tranquille, maintenant: il parlerait, il s'abandonnerait à un flux de paroles, susciterait la présence spirituelle de l'être bien-aimé. Comment se fût-il retenu de céder à cette consolation? D'ailleurs, c'était vrai qu'on pouvait tout dire à Elisabeth: "On peut tout lui dire; elle est étonnante; elle comprend tout" [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I]. 'C'était vrai que .. . ': as so often with such phrases, for a writer like Mauriac, the truth is not so simple. The passage of style indirect libre, followed by direct speech, conveys merely Louis's view of Elisabeth. Gradually we will begin to realise the complexity of her emotions.

At first, this comes merely through hints, as when Louis, in full spate of his emotional outpourings, clearly hits a nerve as he discounts everything but his love:

[ . . . ] un être dont soudain la valeur se découvre à nous jusqu'à nous paraître infime, jusqu'à reléguer tout le reste, à rejeter au néant tout ce qui emplissait notre vie! . . . Qu'as-tu, Babeth?

—Rien, un frisson.

—Durant tout ce temps où je ne l'aimais pas[ . . . ]

As Louis heedlessly rattles on, Elisabeth encourages him by recalling, in her own words, Louis's own cliché about her—in other words, by taking on the character that he has imagined: 'Tu sais bien qu'on peut tout me dire, à moi. A qui donc te confierais-tu, sinon à Babeth?'

The woman whom he loves is a young artist, Andrée. Elisabeth suggests, apparently for Louis's own sake, that Andrée has made up to him for the sake of her career. Many of the actions of this 'absent' character in the story make us believe that this is quite possibly so; our main problem is that we can only see her through the eyes of either Louis or Elisabeth. As Louis, after protesting, admits that he finds it impossible to believe that Andrée loves him, Elisabeth feels it necessary to console him; and, in so doing, reveals his lack of feeling towards her:

Élisabeth le serra de nouveau contre elle, répéta:

—Je le sais bien, moi, que l'on peut t'adorer.

—Toi, chérie, ça ne compte pas.

Elle desserra un peu son étreinte, et comme elle murmurait: 'C'est affreux, ce que tu dis . . . ', il voulut expliquer sa pensée: les époux sont si mêlés l'un à l'autre, si confondus, que les lois ordinaires de l'amour ne les concernent pas.

Louis talks about suffering. Elisabeth, who 'souffrait de ne rien pouvoir pour lui', reassures him that he must be loved by Andrée, because of the jealousy that she, Elisabeth, had suffered when they were together.

Again, Louis's self-centredness comes out: '"—Tu as donc un peu souffert, ma pauvre Babeth?" Il répétait: 'Tu as souffert avec un vague plaisir.'" At every point, we sense Louis's capacity for hurting Elisabeth. Asked whether she has ever made him suffer (in the way Andrée does), he replies that that was impossible, because he knew that she was 'toute à lui'. (Again, a supposition produced as a truth.) When Elisabeth, faced once again by his maudlin meanderings about his love, says that if it were not for the children she would leave, and get out of the way, he protests that he could not imagine life without her and the children. At this, she 'l'embrassa dans un élan de gratitude', but she remembers at the same time how keen he has been to get away from them whenever possible. Once again words are seen to be untrustworthy, and truths to be hidden and uncertain.

From now on Mauriac starts using a technique which is habitual to him in such scenes—his characters' minds wander from what the other is saying. This has two very effective results: the persistence of the speaker is conveyed to us, without our being bored by his repetitions; and the state of mind of the listener is hinted at, without anything precise being stated: 'Depuis quelques instants, Elisabeth n'écoutait plus Louis, elle prêta l'oreille. Ah! c'était de l'autre encore qu'il parlait avec une abondance horrible. [. . . ] La pensée d'Elisabeth fuit encore. Il fait étouffant dans la chambre.'

As the night wears on, and dawn breaks, Louis rattles on, and now touches on a new theme: Andrée, too, is suffering in love, and looks upon Louis as someone she can rely on. In a sense, the Louis-Elisabeth relationship is reflected in the relationship between Andrée and Louis. Andrée has said to him: 'C'est beaucoup pour moi de pouvoir souffrir auprès de vous.' Again, Louis takes Elisabeth's attitude for granted; and she does nothing to contradict him. Describing his own jealousy, he says:

'Que tu dois me trouver bizarre, toi, cœur tranquille! car quoi que tu en dises, c'est une justice à te rendre: tu n'es pas jalouse.'

Elle rit encore, assura que, si peu jalouse qu'elle fût, elle arrivait tout de même à se représenter assez bien ce que pouvait être cette passion.

Gradually, however, we perceive a need in Elisabeth. She needs to know that Louis could have felt jealousy for her in the way he does for Andrée. She asks him outright, and his response is uncomprehending:

—Je suis bien sûre que tu n'as jamais éprouvé à mon propos le moindre mouvement de jalousie?

—Voyons, Babeth, ce serait te faire injure.

Elle éclata de ce mauvais rire, mais Louis ne comprenait pas. Il ne croyait pas qu'avec Elisabeth il y eût même à essayer de comprendre.

Elisabeth now feels the need to open his eyes: 'Enfin, cette nuit, et pour la première fois monte du plus profond de son être une exigence: que Louis sache au moins qu'elle est faite de cette même chair qu'il chérit dans une autre femme.' She attempts to provoke him by allusions to having given him cause for jealousy; but this time, by a brilliant reversal of the technique, it is the self-centred Louis who is not listening:

—Rien à faire, Babeth, je suis tranquille.

Elle s'exaspérait de sentir qu'il l'écoutait à peine; il ne la vers elle, à cette minute: le petit jour éclairait assez cette figure pour qu'il y pût lire les signes d'un désordre profond. Mais il demeurait étendu et les yeux clos.

It is then that she breaks the spell (or attempts to do so) with the violent and provocative remark: Tu as eu tort quelquefois d'être tranquille. At last he looks at her, and realises her feelings; yet almost immediately his self-centredness relegates them once more to the sidelines:

A ces mots, pourtant, il leva les paupières, vit enfin Élisabeth. Le bref regard qu'ils échangèrent éclaira chacun d'eux sur les coups qu'il avait porté à l'autre, au long de cette nuit. Il la prit à son tour dans ses bras, fit un effort pour s'évader de sa propre douleur et pour pénétrer dans cette douleur étrangère. Mais qu'elle lui paraissait mesquine! Il n'aurait jamais cru que Babeth fût capable de ressentir ces pauvres blessures d'amourpropre.

Desperate to prove something, under his questioning she mentions the name of a man, Paul Orgère. He roars with laughter at the thought of that 'nigaud'; and it is true that this, too, had been her opinion of him. But there is something she needs to explain to Louis, and cannot: 'Comment faire entendre à Louis que son indifférence faillit un jour la livrer à cet homme?' As with Thérèse Desqueyroux, as with other Mauriac heroines, Elisabeth finds motivations and emotions impossible to explain; like them she searches her memory in vain for the key: Élisabeth s'efforce de se rappeler [ . . . ] Elle se souvient [ . . . ] '

Chapter III of the story is an account through Elisabeth's memory of a journey alone in a car with Paul Orgère; of the sexual excitement of the drive, and of her exultation because 'aux yeux d'un autre être, elle incarnait le monde et toutes ses délices; quelqu'un, enfin, lui reconnaissait un prix infini. Assez de vivre dans un désert d'indifférence! Why had she not fallen, when they went to a hotel? Because, when she came downstairs for dinner, the 'young god' had become a young man 'en smoking, la boutonnière fleurie d'un œillet, les cheveux lisses et qui sentaient bon', who 'avait au coin des lèvres le sourire de l'aventure'.

Typically, there is more to it than that. Elisabeth's reaction 'Sauvée! ce n'était plus qu'une affaire de verrou' hints at the fact that she is at heart the virtuous, dependable wife that Louis imagines. None of this, of course, can be explained to Louis. All he can see is the expression on her face as she relives the experience; and that expression arouses, for the first time, his compassion: 'Tandis qu'elle refaisait en esprit ce voyage sur une route trop chaude, souhaitant et redoutant à la fois de découvrir à son époux comme elle avait été près de se perdre, Louis l'observait dans le petit jour, plein de pitié pour cette figure exténuée, vieillie.' He attempts to reassure her; she pretends to be reassured. They both believe that, the night aiding, they have exaggerated. Yet the moment Elisabeth leaves the room, Louis shows that he is just as obsessed. Finally, he has a telephone call from Andrée. Typically, as he returns from it, he is once more self-centred, in that he cannot imagine why the telephone call has only changed his mood, and not that of Elisabeth. The story ends with the prospect of his suffering situation continuing ad infinitum: 'Louis, déjà, s'était redressé. Il commença de marcher dans l'atelier, reprenant une à une chaque parole d'Andrée, jusqu'à ce qu'il en eût extrait tout le poison qui lui était nécessaire pour souffrir.'

Like the other two stories, 'Coups de couteau' is openended. We have witnessed an instant in two people's lives, but those lives are going to continue in the same noncommunicating, suffering manner.

All three 1926-7 stories use with great effect the techniques of ambiguity which Mauriac had perfected in the contemporary novels Le Désert de l'amour, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Destins. More than this, however, they also use the techniques of concision essential to the short story. Where, in a novel, a wide variety of psychological characteristics would be invoked, through a series of incidents, here the concentration is on a few clear elements in a relationship, complicated and ambiguous though they turn out to be. By concentrating on one moment in time, and on the obsessions of the characters concerned, Mauriac spotlights these aspects convincingly; it is not necessary, as in a novel, for the characters to be satisfactorily rounded.

Nothing could be more misleading than to think of these stories as potential chapters of a novel. Their open-endedness tells us that things are, in each case, going to continue exactly as they have done. The moment in time that we have witnessed is not a link in a chain of events; it is a bead in a rosary of exactly similar beads, and it is through the depiction of that bead that we have been made fully aware of the nature of the rosary, without the other beads needing to be described.

The next group of short stories is very different, but equally adapted to the genre, to the extent that one cannot imagine the subjects being treated in a different way. By now Mauriac, while still concentrating on specific moments of experience, has become less concerned with the exploration of individual consciousness, and more interested in the clash of personalities, ideas, and impressions; and in the process he creates perfectly chiselled cameos in which certain precise techniques create powerful effects.

I shall take, as the main example, 'Thérèse chez le docteur'. But before doing so, we must clear up a widespread misapprehension. The two Thérèse stories have suffered from the presumption that, because of one character within them, their main importance for Mauriac must have been simply as a continuation of the story of the powerful heroine of Thérèse Desqueyroux. Yet, viewed differently, Thérèse can be seen as a useful figure for a short-story writer in that her characteristics do not need to be described at length. For similar reasons other characters, and families, recur in Mauriac's work from time to time.

This is particularly relevant to 'Thérèse chez le docteur', where, unlike 'Thérèse à l'hôtel', Thérèse is not even the central figure, but serves as a catalyst for the experiences of others. If we approach 'Thérèse chez le docteur' with an open mind, as a short story in its own right, we perceive that the relationship between Dr Schwartz and his wife is not merely a 'cadre' to Thérèse's interview with the psychologist, but is one of the two central points of the story (the other, intimately linked with it, as we shall see, being the attack on psychoanalysis).

The relationship between Elisée and Catherine Schwartz is stressed from the very beginning of the story. We have, first, an example of Elisée's 'plaisir de la contredire et de l'humilier' [Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. III]; this is followed by a section in which the background to the marriage is explained. It is clear that the reader's attention is being directed towards their problems. Once the late-night visit of an 'obsédée' is announced, 'harcelée par le désir du meurtre', Catherine decides to disregard her husband's orders and to remain at hand near his consulting-room (of which we have already conveniently heard that every sound within it could be heard outside). Throughout Thérèse's interview with Dr. Schwartz, which we hear through Catherine's ears, we are aware of Catherine's reactions. The visitor's laugh 'réveillait l'angoisse de l'épouse aux aguets'. The doctor's 'accent affectueux et grave', which he never had when speaking to her, made her realise her own situation: 'Elle se répétait que cet homme, pour elle seule, faisait étalage de sa férocité . . . oui, pour elle seule. Again, the unknown visitor's laugh makes Catherine 'tressaillir'. As the woman pours out her emotions to the doctor, Catherine feels a desire to warn her:

Pourquoi s'adressait-elle à Élis? se demandait Catherine. Pourquoi à lui, précisément, ces confidences? Elle avait envie d'ouvrir la porte du cabinet, de crier à l'inconnue: 'Il n'a rien à vous donner, il ne peut rien pour vous que vous enfoncer davantage dans cette boue. J'ignore à qui il faudrait vous adresser, mais pas à lui, pas à lui!'

This reinforces the picture we have already formed of the doctor's private life, and of his night-club adventures far from his wife, in the course of which he had met Thérèse; it tells us even more about his relationship with Catherine.

There is then a significant moment when Catherine, realising that she is eavesdropping on confidences, decides to go upstairs. We, the readers, naturally go with her, and witness her communion with herself in a mirror: 'Elle s'approcha de la glace, regarda longuement cette figure ingrate avec laquelle il lui fallait traverser sa vie. La lumière, les objets familiers la rassuraient. Qu'avait-elle craint? Quel péril? D'ailleurs, cette femme n'était pas la première venue. We not only learn, here, more about Elisée and Catherine; we also, by a Mauriacian technique with which we are by now familiar, miss some of the conversation below. Raised voices bring her back to listen; but even now, 'une seconde, le bruit de l'ascenseur l'empêche de rien entendre'. From now on, Catherine listens to the whole interview, and we are left in no doubt as to the mood in which she listens:

Catherine savait bien qu'elle n'écoutait plus par simple devoir: il ne s'agissait plus, pour elle, de secourir son mari en cas d'attaque. Non: elle cédait à une curiosité irrépressible [ . . . ] Cette voix inconnue la fascinait, et en même temps, elle ne pouvait supporter la pensée de la déception qui attendait cette malheureuse. Élis n'était même pas capable de la comprendre; pas même d'avoir pitié d'elle. Comme ses autres victimes, il la pousserait à s'assouvir. La délivrance de l'esprit par l'assouvissement de la chair: c'était à cela que se ramenait sa méthode. La même clé immonde lui servait pour interpréter l'héroïsme, le crime, la sainteté, le renoncement . . . Ces idées traversaient confusément l'esprit de Catherine sans qu'elle perdît un mot de ce qui se disaitdans le cabinet.

Catherine's reactions continue to be examined during the interview. Finally, because at one moment she cannot stand her husband's laugh, she 'ferma derrière elle la porte de sa chambre, tomba à genoux contre le lit, se boucha les oreilles, demeura longtemps ainsi, prostrée, abîmée, ne pensant à rien'. We thus miss the climax of the scene in the consulting-room, and it is only the terrified voice of her husband calling her name that causes her to burst into the room, to find Elisée crouching behind the desk, hidden from view, beseeching her to 'disarm' Thérèse, whose right hand, hidden within her handbag, is merely clutching a white packet, and not a weapon.

The story ends with Catherine's reaction to what she has seen or heard. For one single moment in the story we see things through the eyes of her husband: 'Il observait sa femme avec étonnement. Il ne lui avait jamais vu cette figure rayonnante de bonheur.' Her final remarks show just what has happened during the course of the story: Il m'a fallu vingt années . . . Mais enfin, c'est fini! Je suis délivrée, Élis, je ne t'aime plus.' Typically, we are left to wonder which of the many thoughts which had affected her during the story has had this effect and the extent to which her husband's ludicrous behaviour at the end had some bearing on it. As always, the meaning is ambiguous. But, when viewed without parti pris, this story is seen to be about the doctor and his wife, with Thérèse acting above all as an instrument. This is not to say that Thérèse's confession is not a powerful one. But it is only when placed in the Thérèse corpus that it can be made to appear significant in relation to events outside this story—as opposed to details of those outside events being used to give more effect to the story.

The other main theme of the story, the attack on psychoanalysis, is similarly attached to Schwartz rather than to Thérèse, who again is an instrument to make a case. As I have suggested elsewhere, this attack is part of the revulsion that Mauriac felt against the methods of his novels of the mid-1920s: it shows Mauriac turning to an explanation of human behaviour based on supernatural forces, with evil becoming a living force in its own right. Mauriac appears to have been influenced in this by Bernanos's expression of the same problem. Based clearly on the scene between Mouchette and the doctor in Sous le soleil de Satan, the Thérèse-Schwartz scene contains at frequent intervals the 'rire de l'inconnue', the 'rire un peu fou', the 'éclat de rire de l'inconnue (comme une étoffe déchirée)', which in Bernanos's work signify possession by the devil. And Thérèse herself asks the question which the doctor cannot answer: 'Croyez-vous au démon, docteur? Croyez-vous que le mal soit quelqu'un?' Like Bernanos, Mauriac condemns psychiatry for the false issues which, in his view, it presents. Again in the mouth of Thérèse, we hear the indictment: 'Vous faites semblant de vouloir guérir l'âme, et vous ne croyez pas à l'âme . . . Psychiâtre, ça signifie médecin de l'âme, et vous dites que l'âme n'existe pas. Catherine's assessment of her husband's methods, which we have seen above, adds to the indictment. In the other direction, the psychiatry theme adds piquancy to the Elisée-Catherine theme. They are firmly intertwined. For the two clear purposes for which the story was written, the framework and the techniques are perfect.

In 'Thérèse à l'hôtel', where Thérèse plays the central role, the short story is again satisfying and self-sufficient. It has a perfect shape, centred on a short period in time. The relationships andmisunderstandings have, indeed, very wide implications in relation to love, sin and repentance; Thérèse, by her nature, is a perfect central figure for the treatment of such themes. But, like the 'middle-period' stories, this story need not be a link in a chain: it can stand on its own. 'Le Rang', by its skilful use of repetitive evocations of the past, by its repetitions of key phrases in relation to the characteristics of individuals, and by a panoply of the techniques we have already seen in the other stories, is a particularly good example of Mauriac's art. Psychological truths are conveyed not by the more leisurely techniques of the novel, but by a series of hints and flashbacks, which pinpoint states of mind.

It is hoped that what this study has shown is that, in his best short stories, Mauriac succeeds in making a particularly appropriate use of techniques which make of these stories works of art in their own right; and that they should never be seen either as romans manqués, as romans en préparation, or as parts of a corpus which merely serve to throw greater light on the larger works within it.